This report discusses a proposal fromthe Center for International Environmental Law(CIEL), ClientEarth and Friends of the Earth Germany (Bund) on the regulation of nanomaterials in the European Union. It discusses in particular, the proposal for a horizontal regulation on nanomaterials (also referred to as a nano-patch for existing legislation) that would fill in the regulatory gap on nanomaterials. The proposal goes beyond a review of the REACH text and encompasses all EU legislation relevant to nanomaterials. The proposed instrument would amend the REACH text with delimitation in scope to all areas relevant to nanomaterials (on the model of Regulation 1272/2008 on the classification, labelling and packaging of chemicals). The main aim of the regulation is to ensure that hazard, risk and exposure assessments for all forms and uses of such materials are adequately carried out and taken into consideration.

Personal autonomy is at the core of liberal societies, and its preservation has been a focus of European Union (EU) consumer and data protection law. Professionals increasingly use artificial intelligence in consumer markets to shape user preferences and influence their behaviours. This paper focuses on the long-term impact of artificial intelligence on consumer autonomy by studying three specific commercial practices: (1) dark patterns in user interfaces; (2) behavioural advertising; and (3) personalisation through recommender systems. It explores whether and to what extent EU regulation addresses the risks to consumer autonomy of using artificial intelligence in markets in the long term. It finds that new EU regulation does bring novelties to protect consumer autonomy in this context but fails to sufficiently consider the long-term consequences of autonomy capture by professionals. Finally, the paper makes several proposals to integrate the long-term risks affecting consumer autonomy in EU consumer and data protection regulation. It does so through an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from legal research and findings in the study of long-term thinking, philosophy and ethics and computer science.

The environmental consequences of the increasing global seafood production and consumption are substantial and drive a search for providing more adequate governance responses. In recent years, market-based approaches to sustainable seafood governance have gained considerable traction. Born in part out of perceived failures of state-based regulations, a range of civil society-led governance approaches have emerged. Private seafood governance arrangements interact with public seafood regulations and this may lead to competition, collaboration or hybridity. This interaction should however not be assessed in general but more closely related to the different stages in the regulatory cycle: agenda setting/negotiation, implementation and monitoring/enforcement. Collaboration between public and private global seafood governance arrangements occurs primarily in the first phase of the regulatory cycle but gets much less prominent in later phases where competition or even separation prevails. Harmonization between public and private sustainable seafood governance arrangements in the near future is therefore unlikely.

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed our understanding of the state’s role during a public health crisis and introduced an array of unprecedented policy tools: ever-stricter travel restrictions, lockdowns and closures of whole branches of the economy. Evidence-based policymaking seems to be the gold standard of such high-stakes policy interventions. This article presents an empirical investigation into the regulatory impact assessments accompanying sixty-four executive acts (regulations) introducing anti-pandemic restrictions in Poland over the first year of the pandemic. To this end, the study utilises the so-called scorecard methodology, which is popular in regulatory impact assessment research. This methodology highlights the shallowness of these documents and the accompanying processes, with an absence not only of a sound evidence base behind specific anti-pandemic measures or estimates of their economic impacts, but even of the comparative data on restrictions introduced in other European Union/Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Overall, the collected data support the hypothesis that the ad hoc pandemic management process crowded out the law-making process through tools such as regulatory impact assessments and consultations. In other words, the genuine decision-making occurred elsewhere (with the exact process being largely invisible to public opinion and scholars) and drafting legal texts simply codified these decisions, with the law-making process becoming mere window-dressing.

Quantum computing research and development efforts have grown dramatically over the past decades, led in part by initiatives from governments around the world. Government quantum computing investments are often driven by national security or digital sovereignty concerns, with the language used depending on the geography involved. For example, a focus on “national security” and quantum computing is prominent in the USA, while European countries regularly focus on “digital sovereignty”. These phrases are often loosely defined and open to interpretation, and they share some common motivations and characteristics (but also have important differences). This paper identifies specific governmental entities typifying the national security/digital sovereignty perspectives, along with these organisations’ respective roles within national and international policy engagement in quantum computing. It analyses governmental structures, historical developments and cultural characteristics that contributed to this national security–digital sovereignty divide. Building on this analysis, we use the history of other technologies to illustrate how we might adapt tested policy approaches to modern political dynamics and to quantum computing specifically. We frame these policy approaches so that they do not overemphasise “digital sovereignty” or “national security”, but rather address interests shared across both concepts, with a view to facilitating international collaboration.

At the international level, proof of vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 offers an enticing promise to the return of normality, particularly for the much-desired reopening of national borders. At the same time, vaccination passports could be a false hope: the requirement of vaccine passports could adversely embed social and economic inequalities that reflect the power dynamics in international relations. Specifically, the ability to secure vaccines relates to the varying market and economic power across countries. This paper focuses on Taiwan as a case study to explore ways in which the use of COVID-19 certifications, if used as a precondition for international travel, would further exacerbate a binary of exclusion and inclusion as a function of geopolitics. With its relative success in containing the COVID-19 pandemic within its borders, Taiwan represents a low priority for vaccine distribution in the COVAX initiative. Furthermore, due to Taiwan’s contentious political status and its exclusion from the World Health Organization regime, if vaccination passports are required as a precondition for international travel, then outbound passengers from Taiwan potentially could be subjected to restriction of movement absent wide availability of vaccines domestically. This paper argues that insofar as sustainable pandemic control requires a global concerted effort, vaccination passports could further polarise a global response. This paper suggests that equitable access to effective vaccines worldwide and governance reform of global health would help to rebuild global solidarity and mitigate the unimaginable human, social and economic suffering arising from the pandemic.

The Dutch Risk and Responsibility programme (DRRP), which builds on the pioneering work that the BRC and RRAC carried out in Britain, is nearing completion. This article describes the background and course of the programme and offers a glimpse of the preliminary results. DRRP has created awareness of the ‘risk regulation reflex’ among a wide array of people and organisations. That term originated during the Day of Risk, a landmark conference that took place in The Hague marking the start of a fertile international network.

On 5 February 2016, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (hereinafter, NOAA),within the United States (hereinafter, US) Department of Commerce, published a Proposed Rule to create a seafood traceability programme. The programme intends to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (hereinafter, IUU) fishing, prevent fraudulent trade and to serve as the contribution of the US to the global action to combat IUU fishing, along the lines of other similar regulatory frameworks, such as the EU's extensive regulationon IUU fishing. However, despite the legitimate objectives of the measure, it is imperative that regulators take into account the potential consequences for international trade when designing such programmes.

At first sight, the new “better regulation package” probably appears as one of the most ambitious and comprehensive set of measures on the quality of EU regulation developed in recent years. It introduces relevant innovations as far as both better regulation tools(impact assessment-IA, ex post evaluation, consultation) and governance (the Regulatory Scrutiny Board-RSB, the REFIT Platform and the proposal on the new Inter-institutional agreement on Better Lawmaking-IIA)are concerned. Moreover, the package is a clear demonstration of the Commission's political commitment towards the relaunch of the smart regulation agenda, already proved by its inclusion within the scope of the mandate of the First Vice President, Mr. Timmermans.

Nonetheless, ambition and wideness are not the only relevant criteria to judge the package. It could indeed be assessed also from a different perspective, i.e. by analysing the possible effects it could produce and the incentives it could provide for some key players: EU institutions, Member States (MS) and stakeholders.

In July 2018 the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that organisms obtained from most New Plant Breeding Technologies (NPBT) fulfil the requirements of the GMO definition of Directive 2001/18. Practically, organisms created with NPBT have since been legally treated as GMOs. While we do not seek to contest the judgment in itself, in the present contribution we draw attention to the effects of such a categorisation from the perspective of communication science. Extrapolating from communication research conducted in adjacent technology domains, we will argue that by putting organisms obtained from NPBT semantically in the same basket as GMOs may carry a serious risk – transferring analogous communication problems that GMOs encountered in the past, to organisms obtained from NPBT, while they may not address similar risks. Possible consequences such as these can hardly be considered at the stage of legal interpretation (such as with the CJEU). Rather, as discussion now unfolds whether and how to change the legal definition, insights from communication science and risk perception research on the effect of such a definition should be taken into account.

This report addresses the legal concept of “self-evident” and “flagrantly misleading” advertising established in Article 7(1)(c) of Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2011 on the provision of food information to consumers (hereinafter, the Food Information Regulation, FIR). Since 13 December 2014 (since the specific origin of vegetable oils must be declared), “palm oil-free” claims on, e.g., a product containing sunflower oil or any other vegetable oil (and mandatorily indicating it in the list of ingredients) are arguably obvious, unnecessary and irrelevant (and in legal terms “selfevident” and “flagrantlymisleading”). Compared to similar foods that possess the same characteristics, but do not claim to be “palm oil-free”, these products are in no way “special”.

While there is now a large amount of social science research on scientific expertise, testimonies made by sociologists who themselves participated in scientific expertise on a controversial topic remain rare. It is this type of feedback and testimony that this paper will articulate and discuss. The aim is to propose a series of reflections on scientific expertise from a personal experience: the participation of the author as a sociologist in an expert committee set up by the former French Agency for the Safety of Health, the Environment and Work (AFSSET) on the topic of radio-frequencies. Several problematic aspects of scientific expertise will thus be discussed from this concrete experience: the problem of the composition of the expert group and the issue of conflict of interest, the way in which the work of expertise is organized within the group, the effects of the presence of an observer from an association, and the differences between scientific work and scientific expertise.

EU network codes are legally binding rules related to cross-border and market integration issues and elaborated through a complex procedure set by the third energy package. This article comments on the experience accumulated so far and identifies future challenges by following the “life cycle” of EU network codes from their elaboration phase to the current stage of their implementation.

The contribution of social sciences to risk assessment has often been confined to dimensions of risk perception and communication. This article relates an effort to promote knowledge from the social sciences that addresses other dimensions of risk issues. A sociological checklist produced for ANSES in France helps to identify and analyse social dimensions that should be given attention during the process of risk assessment.

Enforcement of the European System of Financial Supervision (ESFS) has undergone a three-step process over time, leading it to a current networked configuration of powers and tasks between the EU and the national competent authorities (NCAs). In light of this, this paper has a twofold aim. First, it analyses the actual configuration of enforcement mechanisms in the ESFS, arguing that different patterns emerge across the three branches (banks, securities markets and insurance): as governance becomes more complex in terms of number of actors and functions, verticalisation of enforcement increases. Second, by taking into account the three Italian competent authorities, it assesses the concrete changes occurred both in organisation and in perceived effectiveness, through quantitative data and qualitative surveys. It therefore argues that the more institutionalised and verticalised is the enforcement governance, the less reluctant will NCAs be to transfer shares of their enforcing powers to the EU level and to change their practices and organisational structures concretely, according to harmonisation requirements by the European supervisory authorities and the European Central Bank.

Trilogues represent a decisive stage in the European Union (EU) legislative process and often settle the substantive content of EU legislation. During trilogues, negotiations move fast and new solutions are actively identified by the negotiators. The (lack of) transparency of trilogues has been repeatedly criticised in recent years, yet the EU institutions have defended their “space to think”. Relying on a set of interviews with trilogue participants, this paper mirrors the institutional practices in the final stages of EU law-making against the requirements of openness in the EU Treaties, which aim to strengthen “democracy by allowing citizens to scrutinize all the information which has formed the basis of a legislative act”. The paper argues that, despite noble proclamations, the EU’s legislative practices are characterised by institutional discretion and the lack enforcement of transparency requirements. The paper describes how trilogues are conducted and how questions involving risk management and technically complex issues are assessed in this process. Greater transparency would also help to ensure that risks and alternatives are properly assessed and would thus contribute to better-quality risk regulation in the EU.